The siege of Malta begins

On the morning of 11 June 1940, a few hours after Italy declared war on France and Britain, the first Italian bombers appeared over Malta. The sirens sounded shortly before seven in the morning, local time. Bombs fell on the dockyard in the Grand Harbour, on Hal Far airfield and on the old forts guarding the harbour entrance. The Italians came back several more times before evening. It was the first of more than three thousand air-raid alerts that the Maltese would live through by 1943, and the start of a siege that was to last almost two and a half years.

An island nobody wanted to defend

Malta had been in British hands since 1800 and formally a British colony since 1814, and it was Britain’s only naval base between Gibraltar and Alexandria. The Grand Harbour and the Three Cities above it housed the naval dockyard, docks, stores and headquarters, and for decades in peacetime the British Mediterranean Fleet had been based there. But the island is small, and less than a hundred kilometres separate it from Sicily – less than half an hour’s flying time. Some 250,000–270,000 people lived on Malta and neighbouring Gozo, most of them crowded around the harbour, that is, right next to the most important targets. Malta also imported almost three-quarters of its food.

Ever since the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 the British had argued over whether Malta could be held at all in a war with Italy. According to the British official history, the Admiralty wanted the island to be so strong that attacking it would no longer be worthwhile, because without it the fleet could not effectively cut Italy’s lines of communication with Libya. The Air Ministry, by contrast, believed that no defence could stop the Italian air force from turning Malta into a useless base. In July 1939 the Committee of Imperial Defence approved an expansion of the defences to 112 heavy and 60 light anti-aircraft guns, 24 searchlights and four fighter squadrons. Little of this had been carried out by the time war with Italy broke out. In the spring of 1940, as Italy’s entry into the war became ever more likely, Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s Mediterranean Fleet moved to the better-protected harbour of Alexandria in Egypt. Some Maltese took this as proof that London had no serious intention of defending them.

In May 1940 the island’s future also surfaced briefly in politics. As the Allies were losing in France, the French pressed London to buy Mussolini’s neutrality with concessions, and according to some studies Malta was among the possible bargaining chips mentioned. In the dispute in the War Cabinet, Winston Churchill persuaded the ministers to make no concessions to Italy. That did not make the defence of Malta a priority: every fighter and gun was needed for the defence of Britain itself.

The defenders

From April 1940 the Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Malta was Lieutenant General William Dobbie, a sapper who before the war had commanded British troops in Malaya. He was already over sixty and preparing for retirement when the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Edmund Ironside, offered him the post. He first served as acting governor and was confirmed in the appointment in May. He was a deeply religious man and made no secret of his faith, even in his orders. On the day Italy declared war he told the garrison that the government’s decision to fight on until its enemies were defeated would be received with the greatest satisfaction, and declared: “It may be that hard times lie ahead of us, but I know that however hard they may be, the courage and determination of all ranks will not falter, and that with God’s help we will maintain the security of this fortress.”

The forces at his disposal were modest. The garrison consisted of four battalions of British infantry, a local volunteer regiment and the Maltese gunners of the Royal Malta Artillery. Of the anti-aircraft guns approved a year earlier, 34 heavy and 8 light guns were on the island, along with all 24 searchlights. A single radar station was in operation, and it could not work continuously. At the airfields at Hal Far and Luqa (the latter still being completed) there were a few seaplanes, trainers and torpedo aircraft, but not a single modern fighter. In the harbour lay the old monitor HMS Terror, two gunboats and a few submarines.

The Gladiators and the legend

Malta’s only fighters were Gloster Sea Gladiator naval biplanes, already obsolete in 1940. Early in the year the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious had left eighteen of them on the island in crates as a reserve for her air group. Three were taken back for the expedition to Norway (Glorious herself was sunk by German warships on 8 June), and three were sent to Egypt. In the spring the air officer commanding in Malta decided to form a makeshift fighter flight at Hal Far from the rest. A few aircraft were assembled, and the pilots were volunteers from the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm, mostly staff officers and flying-boat pilots with almost no experience of fighter combat. On 11 June four Gladiators were serviceable, two of which stood by for take-off throughout the daylight hours.

This handful of aircraft gave rise to one of the most famous legends of the war: that for the first weeks Malta was defended by just three Gladiators, named Faith, Hope and Charity. Aviation historians correct it. More than three machines flew in combat, though rarely more than three at once, and further crated aircraft served as a source of spare parts. The names themselves were given to the aircraft by the Maltese press only many months later. Yet the legend aptly conveyed the disparity of forces and was enormously important for morale. By attacking bomber formations from above before their escorts could react, the Gladiators forced the Italians to provide stronger fighter cover, and according to the British official history Italian intelligence credited the island with as many as twenty-five fighters at the start of the war. The only surviving aircraft of the group, Faith, can be seen today in the war museum at Fort St Elmo in Valletta.

The Regia Aeronautica over the island

Italy had long been preparing for a war over Malta. In 1938 the staff drew up a plan for a landing that envisaged the use of 40,000 troops, the whole fleet and several hundred aircraft, but it was judged impracticable for lack of equipment and supplies. In June 1940 Mussolini saw no need for an invasion: he expected that after the fall of France Britain would quickly make peace and Malta would drop into Italy’s hands of its own accord. So the air force was to strike. The Regia Aeronautica assembled several dozen Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bombers, together with Macchi MC.200 and Fiat CR.42 fighters, on Sicilian airfields, including Catania and Comiso.

The first raid came at dawn on 11 June. According to the British official history, ten Italian aircraft bombed the dockyard and Hal Far airfield, and a second attack, by twenty-five machines, followed in the late afternoon. Maltese records speak of seven bombing raids and one reconnaissance flight during the day; some studies count eight raids. In all, several dozen bombers with fighter escort came over the island that day. The Italians bombed from high altitude, about six kilometres, and their aim was poor. They were engaged by the anti-aircraft guns, the monitor Terror and the gunboats in the harbour. The Gladiators took off to fight. One of the pilots claimed to have damaged an Italian fighter, but no aircraft was shot down that day.

The very first raid had the most tragic consequences. A stick of bombs hit the upper part of Fort St Elmo at the entrance to the Grand Harbour and killed six gunners of the Royal Malta Artillery, among them a sixteen-year-old boy. They were the first servicemen to fall in the defence of Malta. The Italian airmen had orders to avoid residential districts, but around the harbour the houses stood right up against the quays and bombs hit them too. According to Maltese records, eleven civilians were killed on 11 June and about 130 wounded. The figure of around thirty dead found in some lists is higher than the Maltese records indicate. The material damage was less than had been feared.

The first weeks

After the first raids a mass exodus began from the Three Cities and the area around the harbour. Tens of thousands of people fled to villages inland, which at once complicated the distribution of food. Rock-cut tunnels, cellars and the old galleries of the fortifications were adapted as shelters. The British official history stresses that the population’s morale recovered quickly, thanks in large part to Governor Dobbie, who became a symbol of endurance for the Maltese.

By the end of June the Italians had carried out another 36 raids, by day and by night, the largest of them by sixty bombers. They hit dockyard buildings, Fort St Angelo, the naval hospital and a submarine in dock, and on 21 June they sank the floating dock. Malta received only modest reinforcements. A few Hawker Hurricane fighters passing through the island on their way to Egypt were kept on Malta, and in the last week of June the defence had four serviceable Hurricanes and two Gladiators. Around 20 June twelve Fleet Air Arm Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers arrived from France, giving the island its first strike force against Italian shipping.

The fleet at Alexandria

Malta’s fate was to depend to a great extent on the fleet. The Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Cunningham, made it his principle to seek battle with the Italians from the very first day. At one in the morning on 11 June he led out of Alexandria the ships he had to hand: the battleships Warspite and Malaya, the aircraft carrier Eagle, five cruisers and nine destroyers. He left behind two older battleships because they were too slow and there were not enough destroyers. For several days the fleet cruised off the Libyan coast and came within a hundred and something kilometres of the “heel” of the Italian boot, but met no Italian warships. On 12 June, south of Crete, an Italian submarine sank the cruiser HMS Calypso, the fleet’s first loss of the war. Thirty-nine sailors were killed. On 14 June the ships returned to Alexandria.

Cunningham knew that Malta could be invaluable to his fleet as a forward base, and from the first days he pressed the Admiralty to send fighters to the island. He had to reckon, however, with the fact that after the sinking of the floating dock and the loss in June of three of the four submarines operating from Malta, the base had for the time being ceased to be of use to his ships.

Its place in the war

The first days of the siege exposed the weaknesses of both sides. The British entered the war with Italy with the island almost defenceless. The Italians failed to exploit the moment: they neither attempted a landing nor concentrated enough aircraft to paralyse the harbour and airfields. On 18 June the British Chiefs of Staff even considered withdrawing the whole fleet from the eastern Mediterranean, but postponed the decision, and the matter was overtaken by events.

In the summer of 1940 Malta began to receive fighters flown off aircraft carriers; in July Cunningham’s fleet clashed with the Italian fleet at the Battle of Calabria (Punta Stilo), and in November aircraft from the carrier Illustrious attacked Taranto. Aircraft and submarines operating from the island attacked the convoys to Libya with growing success. When the Germans appeared in North Africa, Hitler sent the Luftwaffe’s X Air Corps to Sicily in January 1941, and from the end of 1941 the forces of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring were operating over Malta. By the spring of 1942 the island was one of the most heavily bombed places in the world; it was starving and close to surrender. On 15 April 1942 King George VI awarded the George Cross to the whole of Malta. Salvation came from convoys, paid for with heavy losses, above all Operation Pedestal in August 1942. The German and Italian landing planned against the island never took place. The siege ended only in November 1942, after the victory at El Alamein and the Allied landings in North Africa, when all the ships of a convoy from Alexandria reached Malta without loss. According to Maltese figures, some fifteen hundred civilians were killed in the raids.

Malta held out, and its importance for the war in North Africa proved enormous. Aircraft and submarines from the island sank hundreds of ships carrying supplies for the Axis forces, and in 1943 Malta became a base for the invasion of Sicily. All of this began on the morning of 11 June 1940, when a handful of old biplanes took off to fight the Italian bombers.